IN PRACTICE: Performing Twinship: Molly & Aviva Rose-Williams
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by SIMA BELMAR
Sommi, formed the circus col- lective À Sens Unique (“one- way”), and relocated to Renard’s hometown of Le Mans, France. (I highly suggest you pause your reading and watch a few À Sens Unique videos on YouTube to get a feel for their charming blend of circus arts and physical theater.) Aviva currently resides in Brussels but tries to visit the Bay Area as much as her tour schedule allows. Molly started dancing in col- lege, and continued, somewhat to her surprise, after graduating. Side by Side was the first piece the two made together—a test- run of sorts to see what might happen if they were to bring these parts of their lives that had developed separately from one another back together. Mind the Gap , a full-length show, felt like the natural next step.
Aviva (left) and Molly (right) Rose-Williams / Photo by Eric Gillet
On January 25, 2018 , Molly and Aviva Rose- Williams performed Side by Side at Paufve Dance’s 8x8x8 performance series at The Uptown in Oakland. I was there that night and have also watched the footage (deftly videographed by Erin Halley) multiple times to try to put my finger on why I consider it a perfect work. An engaging mixture of sen- sibilities and movements drawn from cir- cus (spectacle!) and minimalist, postmodern dance (anti-spectacle!), Side by Side is six satisfying minutes of comedic intimacy. I was most moved by the moments when Molly and Aviva engage in brief gestural conver- sations, enlarging the gesture space beyond face, head, shoulders, arms, and hands to include the whole body. Molly and Aviva Rose-Williams are Berke- ley natives and also twin sisters. Their most recent collaboration, Mind the Gap , per- formed at Kinetic Arts Center where Molly and Aviva are 2019 resident artists, builds on the Side by Side to explore the pleasures and pains of being twins—the unparal- leled intimacy, sometimes marked by play- ful exuberance and mutual support, other times an uncomfortable mirror to be cov- ered with a sheet and hidden in the corner (read: they adore each other and also ben- efit to a degree from living on nearly oppo- site sides of the world). I brought my kids, 12 and 6, to that show, and all three sets of eyeballs were glued to the stage, a rare suc- cessful intergenerational performance out- ing—in other words, not one of us stood up to shout, “THIS IS SOOO BORING. CAN WE LEAVE?” (Yes, one of my children did that at a performance, I kid you not.) With technique, wit, and fearless vulnerability (is there any other kind?), Molly and Aviva charmed us all. The twins grew up with parents who Aviva says, “both appreciate the arts and both feel like anything’s possible.” Early on they trained in circus, first with Splash Cir- cus Theatre and later as members of the San Francisco Youth Circus from 2006 to 2009. After attending Berkeley High, Aviva and Molly auditioned for the National Cir- cus School in Montreal, a grueling, four-day experience that resulted in neither being accepted. Aviva: “It was awful. They cut people as the days go on, so if you’re left at the end, you’ve seen all of your friends get cut. Mol got cut and we were auditioning together, so she ended up having to come in just for the hour that I needed her to do our act. It was so unpleasant.”When Aviva was sitting in the canteen with the final 30 audi- tioners, a young man rushed in. Aviva: “He had his coat over his head, got on his hands and knees, and started running around the canteen whispering, ‘There’s a circus school
in Quebec! Come audition. Auditions are next week. Tell everyone about it!’ Though I came back to the Bay Area to study nursing at USF, I realized, ‘Oh! There’s another circus school in the world.’” Molly spent three months in Bolivia and then went off to Middlebury College. Aviva spent an unfulfilling year at USF and training in the professional acrobatics program at the San Francisco Circus Center before follow- ing the advice of that “crazy guy.” She audi- tioned at École de Cirque de Québec, got in, got on a plane, and never turned back. Upon graduating with a degree in Chinese Pole in 2013, Aviva and cohort-mates Helene Leveau, Benjamin Renard, and Constanza
One of the themes of Mind the Gap is the geographical and psychoemotional distance the twins have experienced since graduat- ing high school. Much of the verbal text in the show explores the sisters’ mutual but not always simultaneously experienced urge to individuate from each other. In a gor- geous moment in the piece, Molly unwinds herself from an intertwining duet and says, “Every time we separate it feels like my heart is being ripped out of my chest and part of me is being hollowed away. But without all these miles between us, I don’t think I could have ever learned how to be by myself.” Then Aviva says, “Or with other people,” and Molly says, “Or with other people.” The
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CONTENTS
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ON THIS PAGE / In Practice: Molly & Aviva Rose-Williams by Sima Belmar 4 / Dancing Again: My Body After a Near-Death Experience by Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz 6 / June Performance Calendar 8 / Finding the Fog Beast by Damara Vita Ganley 10 / Fabric Animal : Weaving Bodies Through Time by Nancy Karp, Sonsheree Giles, and Sebastian Grubb 12 / Big Moves Dance Company: Beyond Body Positive Towards Fat Liberation by Aries Jordan
Molly (left) and Aviva (right) Rose-Williams / Photo by Eric Gillet
2 in dance JUN 2019
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